POV

Fortune 500 CMOs: your era of siloed campaigns and fluffy CX rhetoric is over. My two-book series, Journey to Customer Obsession: A Blueprint for CX Maturity and Enterprise Transformation (2nd Ed.) and, Journey to Customer Obsession: A Blueprint for Operationalizing Customer Engagement – is not a gentle suggestion but a battle plan. They equip you with both the strategy and the execution roadmap for a customer-centric marketing revolution. The question is simple: will you follow the blueprint or watch competitors steamroll you?

Strategic Blueprint: Elevate CX Maturit

The harsh truth is: CX cannot be a series of ad-hoc fixes. Companies must become customer‑obsessed enterprises – driven by journeys, aligned across functions, and anchored in measurable business value. In Journey to Customer Obsession (CX Maturity) there is a clear CX maturity model so you can diagnose your CX maturity and activate a clear, progressive transformation roadmap and align teams around customer journeys, not internal processes.

No more tinkering with the margins – every marketing dollar must tie back to real outcomes. The book shows how to link journey metrics (satisfaction, NPS, retention) to the bottom line (revenue growth, cost savings) so that every touchpoint moves the needle on ROI.

One insurer’s CX leaders illustrated this: by mixing satisfaction, efficiency and financial metrics on a journey dashboard, they stopped asking “Are customers happy?” and started asking “How much revenue are we preserving by resolving claims faster?”.

That’s the mindset shift this demands – prove every customer effort with dollars and cents, or don’t bother.

Journey Pods and Governance: Breaking Silos

Forget traditional organizational charts, the operational playbook shows you how to restructure around the customer journey with “Journey Management Pods”. These cross-functional teams – Strategy Pod, Design Pod, Analytics Pod, etc, cover each phase of the journey end-to-end.

This “pod” model creates a golden thread from executive vision all the way to daily execution. No more “throw it over the wall”. Product, marketing, IT and service folk now act as an agile unit, all focused on one journey goal. Governance is baked in via monthly journey reviews, CX councils and KPI scorecards ensure this is not a one-off project.

Templates – charters, review agendas and a “Journey ROI Calculator” – make obsession sustainable. The message to lax CMOs is brutal: if your teams aren’t restructured into journey pods and marching to a shared operating rhythm, you’re still stuck in the last decade.

Orchestration and AI: One-to-One at Scale

Modern customers demand context and speed. The playbook forces CMOs to move beyond campaign blasts. A centerpiece is journey orchestration – real-time coordination of every channel and touchpoint based on where each customer is in their journey. Orchestration means using real-time journey context to ensure each touchpoint is connected, relevant, and informed by what came before.

Imagine a loyalty customer abandoning a cart: instead of siloed follow-ups, orchestration triggers an instant email and SMS and in-app offer – each with the right context to rescue the sale. Under the hood, an orchestration engine calls a Next-Best-Action (NBA) decisioning system. When a trigger fires, the NBA engine (powered by AI/ML) picks the optimal message or action for the customer at that moment.

This isn’t academic: firms deploying NBA see real lifts. Research shows that NBA-driven marketers achieve roughly 2× higher click-through rates and significantly higher conversions than static campaigns. In practice, orchestration plus NBA ensure responsiveness to each customer’s behavior and context-aware engagement is the rule instead of the exception.

In other words: batch-and-blast marketing is dead. If you still think spraying emails and ads will cut it, prepare to miss the mark.

Analytics and ROI: From Anecdotes to Dollars

Crucially, every change must quantify ROI. Gerber provides a “Journey ROI Calculator” and insists on tying improvements to dollars: saving time, reducing churn, increasing spend.

The ROI isn’t theoretical. In one telecom case study, a cross-functional “lighthouse” journey team overhauled onboarding and delivered jaw-dropping results. They slashed redundant touches (calls and visits) and simplified processes. Early churn plummeted by 12% – worth about $50 million in retained revenue – while support costs fell by $20 million annually. Customer satisfaction shot up 18 points, and even the skeptical CFO “saw the numbers” and became an evangelist.

The point: hard data turned CX from a soft cost into a hard profit center. Without this discipline, CX remains an easily axed “nice-to-have”.

Act Now or Risk Falling Behind

The two volumes offer more than lofty vision – they lay out the execution playbook CMOs desperately need. The first book diagnoses where your organization is on the CX maturity curve and how to advance it. The second shows you how to do it: build journey teams, orchestrate in real time, and measure relentlessly. Together, they give marketing leaders “the strategy and the execution roadmap” to make customer obsession real.

This is a call to action. For Fortune 500 CMOs, the math is simple: adopt these frameworks now – or risk being commoditized by rivals who do. Now is the time to act. Do it, and you elevate marketing from cost center to growth engine. Ignore it, and you’ll be left in the dust. The choice is yours – but the map is laid out.

Sources: Gerber, Journey to Customer Obsession: A Blueprint for CX Maturity and Enterprise Transformation (2nd Ed.); Gerber, Journey to Customer Obsession: A Blueprint for Operationalizing Customer Engagement.